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Optical cooling achieved by tuning thermal radiation

It is well established that solid objects can be cooled by harnessing the properties of laser light. A laser-free technique that attains such cooling by tuning thermal radiation could have many practical applications.
  1. Yannick De Wilde

    1. Yannick De Wilde is at the Langevin Institute, ESPCI Paris, CNRS, PSL University, 75005 Paris, France.

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  2. Riad Haidar

    1. Riad Haidar is at ONERA the French Aerospace Lab, University of Paris-Saclay, 91120 Palaiseau, France.

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When two bodies are at different temperatures and not in direct contact with each other, it is generally assumed that thermal radiation (heat) will be transferred from the hotter body to the colder one. If the distance between the bodies is larger than the dominant thermal wavelength (about 10 micrometres at room temperature1), there is a maximum heat-transfer rate, known as the black-body limit. Writing in Nature, Zhu et al.2 report that an electronic device called a photodiode can cool a solid that is colder than the photodiode when the two objects are in each other’s near field — that is, when they are separated by a distance much smaller than the thermal wavelength. This demonstration could have a tremendous impact on the fields of cooling and heat management.

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Nature 566, 186-187 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-00526-x

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